Five Very Useful Photoshop Tricks You Might Not Have Known

Photoshop is tremendously complex and nuanced, and there are always techniques or entirely new features to be discovered. This helpful video will give you five lesser known tricks to add to your arsenal.

Coming to you from Jesús Ramirez of the Photoshop Training Channel, this video outlines five highly useful techniques and features in Photoshop. Perhaps my two favorite tips are working with luminosity masks and making selections with color ranges. As you probably already know, a lot of work in Photoshop revolves around making targeted adjustments, and so, having a multitude of ways to select certain parts of your image is important to being able to work efficiently and precisely. Very often, you'll want to add an adjustment to a certain range of luminance values or address a certain set of colors, which is where these tricks become so enormously handy. An additional tip: when working with the Color Range selection tool, if you're working with something like skin, try changing the sample size from "point" to something like "11 x 11 average." Doing so will help ensure you don't end up with an erroneous selection if you accidentally click a pore or the like and will likely give you a result that's more in line with the general tone. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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7 Comments

Great tip with the Luminosity mask shortcuts. I knew the technique before, but not the shortcut!
I use so many shortcuts and don#t like using my pen for clicking around. Thank you very much for that!

As it comes to the second method, I think it's faster to make a stamp visible layer and use the patch tool to subdue blemishes and wrinkles, while changing the opacity of the layer. Then you don't have to switch between lighten and darken all the time.

The third tip is also fantastic. Finally really new useful advices instead of youtubers talking all the time about the same stuff. I work as a retoucher full time and those tipps are really really practical!

Four and five I already knew.
Thanks for sharing, Alex!

My pleasure! Jesús is one of my favs.

Thx Alex. Sorry for that question, maybe I'm completely stumped now, but what is one of your faves? :D

Sorry, just my shorthand for "favorite!"

Great tips, I don't use ps much but good to know.

This is a great article and one of the core reasons Fstoppers have always been my preferred source of photography info.

Awesome tips using LAB colour. I never thought to use that one. Just need to try and remember all the shortcut now!